The National LGBTQ Task Force announced on Tuesday that long-time transgender rights activist and community leader Kris Hayashi has joined the organization as its director of advocacy and action.
Hayashi most recently served as the executive director of the Transgender Law Center and previously led the Audre Lorde Project as its executive director/co-director.
“We could not be more excited or honored to welcome Kris Hayashi to our team and the Task Force family. Kris will bring immeasurable expertise to our advocacy and policy work as our community, especially our trans and non-binary siblings, are under unrelenting and unprecedented attacks,” said Kierra Johnson, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, in a statement.
Hayashi told The Advocate that he was “honored” and thrilled to be joining Johnson and the Task Force. But he understands there is a real danger to LGBTQ+ rights, specifically to the rights of transgender people.
“I will say that particularly at this moment, particularly at this time when trans communities, when nonbinary communities, when we are facing an escalation in attacks on our rights and our lives, I am excited to be joining the Task Force to be able to support and continue the organization’s work to really build an LGBTQ progressive movement that centers trans power, resistance, and joy,” he said.
The work he has before him isn’t anything new, Hayashi explained.
“As a trans person, as a person of color, as a queer person here in the U.S., from a pretty young age, I understood that the world was not set up for me to survive and thrive,” he said.
That experience led him to a professional career in advocacy and activism from California to New York.
“I was really fortunate and privileged to have mentors — from Black power movements, from migrant justice movements, from environmental justice movements — who really took me under their wing, and I really learned from them the ways that our communities have in the past and continue to speak truth to power, to fight for justice, and to build strong movements,” Hayashi said.
As he sets out to lead the Task Force’s advocacy and action arm, Hayashi said it’s important to understand the violence LGBTQ+ people already face. Attacks on transgender and nonbinary people were already endemic. Now, there’s a more legislative turn that’s amplifying the attacks.
“In this moment, trans and nonbinary people are facing just an extreme escalation in attacks on our rights and lives across the globe, but specifically here in the U.S.,” Hayashi said. “Over 20 states have passed laws that ban and in some cases criminalize our health care. Similarly, states have banned trans you from playing sports. We’re seeing attacks on our ability to get identity documents, [go to] bathrooms, even [our names].”
He continued: “It’s very clear that the conservative right is using attacking trans and non-binary people to advance their anti-democratic agenda, which ultimately impacts everyone.”
Hayashi said that local LGBTQ+ leaders are still trying to combat such measures, but they need support. They need more help.
That’s where, he said, the Task Force and his work comes in.
“[Local leaders] cannot do it alone,” he said. “This is a time when we need to bring all of our resources and all our capacities into this fight because there is just so much at stake, not just for trans people, but really for all of us.”
Findings from the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey counter the right-wing narrative about “transition regret” by showing how gender-affirming care improves trans people’s lives, while the survey also documents the continued discrimination and marginalization trans Americans face.
The NCTE released its “Early Insights” report of survey findings Wednesday. The survey includes data from 92,329 binary and nonbinary trans people across the U.S., the largest number of participants ever. “Early Insights” is the first in a series of reports to be released from the survey.
Ninety-four percent of respondents who lived at least some of the time in a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth reported that they were either “a lot more satisfied” (79 percent) or “a little more satisfied” (15 percent) with their life than before their transition. Nearly all of those who were undergoing hormone treatment or had received at least one form of gender-affirming surgery said this health care had improved their lives.
Respondents also reported substantial family support, with more than two-thirds of trans adults saying that their families were either supportive or highly supportive of their identity and gender expression.
“It’s impactful to see so many trans people report life satisfaction when they live according to their gender identity and get the health care they need, but we also see that trans people face substantial barriers to living full, healthy, and authentic lives,” Dr. Sandy E. James, co-principal investigator and lead researcher for the survey, said in a press release. “As the most comprehensive source of data about trans people in the U.S., these findings fill an important gap in our knowledge and serve as a critical resource for understanding and addressing the needs of trans people.”
Trans people still face discrimination and mistreatment at work, at school and elsewhere, according to the survey.
Eleven percent of respondents who had ever held a job said they had lost a job because of their gender identity or expression.
Eighty percent of adult respondents and 60 percent of 16- and 17-year-old respondents who were out or perceived as trans in elementary or secondary school said they went through one or more forms of mistreatment or negative experience.
Of those who had seen a health care provider within the previous 12 months, 48 percent reported having at least one negative experience because they were transgender, such as being refused health care, being misgendered, or being verbally or physically abused.
Most respondents reported being denied equal treatment due to their gender identity or being verbally harassed, physically harassed, or harassed online.
Respondents also faced economic challenges. Thirty-four percent were experiencing poverty. The unemployment rate among respondents was 18 percent. Nearly one-third had experienced homelessness in at some point.
Regarding the impact of discriminatory laws, 47 percent of respondents had thought about moving to another state because their state government considered or passed anti-trans laws and 5 percent had moved out of state because of this. The top 10 states from which respondents moved for this reason were Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
“Trans people deserve equal access to the same societal benefits as everyone else — access to good jobs, affordable health care, stable housing and to feel safe in their communities,” said Josie Caballero, director of the survey. “The ‘Early Insights’ report highlights how much further the U.S. still needs to go to achieve trans equality.”
NCTE developed the survey in partnership with the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the TransLatin@ Coalition, and the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance.
“Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and fairness,” added Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of NCTE. “We need laws at the federal and state level that make sure all people — including trans people — are treated fairly. No one should ever face discrimination in employment, housing, health care, education, and other areas of life just because of who they are. Transgender people are here to stay, and we are proud of who we are.”
In the past century, there have been three waves of opposition to transgenderhealth care.
In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe. In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States. And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave.
On the other hand, the archives of transgender medicine demonstrate that backlash against these practices has historically been rooted in pseudoscience. And today, an anti-science movement that aims to discredit science altogether is fueling the fire of the current wave of anti-trans panic.
The 1930s − eugenics and sexology collide
In the 1920s, the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness. In the field of sexology – the study of human sexuality, founded in 19th century Europe – scientists were excited about research on animals demonstrating that removing or transplanting gonads could effectively change an organism’s sex.
In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice. Hirschfeld worked closely with trans women as co-researchers throughout the 1920s. Several trans women also received care at the institute, including orchiectomies that halted the production of testosterone in their bodies.
Within months of Hitler’s rise to power in early 1933, a mob of far-right studentsbroke into and shuttered the institute for being “un-German.” Some of the most famous images of Nazi book burning show the institute’s library set ablaze in an outdoor plaza.
Nazi ideology was based on another prominent field of science of that time: eugenics, the belief that certain superior populations should survive while inferior populations must be exterminated. In fact, Hirschfeld’s sexology and Nazi race science had common roots in the Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms.
But in the late 19th century, many scientists went a step further and developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences. As race scientists imagined a fixed number of human races of varying intelligence, sexologists simultaneously sought to classify sexual behaviors as innate, inherited states of being: the “homosexual” in the 1860s and the “transvestite,” a term coined by Hirschfeld himself, in 1910.
But where Hirschfeld and other sexologists saw the classification of queer and trans people as justifications for legal emancipation, eugenicists of the early 20th century in the U.S. and Europe believed sexually transgressive people should be sterilized and ultimately eradicated.
By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights.
Yet trouble was brewing behind the scenes. Jon Meyer, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was skeptical of whether medical interventions really helped transgender people. In 1979, Meyer, along with his secretary Donna Reter, published a short academic paper that ushered in the second wave of historic backlash to trans medicine.
In their study, Meyer and Reter contacted previous patients of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. To understand whether surgery had improved patients’ lives, the authors developed an “adjustment scoring system.” They assigned points to patients who were in heterosexual marriages and had achieved economic security since their operations, while deducting points from those who continued to engage in gender nonconformity, homosexuality, criminality, or sought mental health care.
Meyer and Reter believed that gender-affirming surgeries were successful only if they made model citizens out of transgender people: straight, married and law-abiding.
In their results, the authors found no negative effects from surgery, and no patients expressed regret. They concluded that “sex reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation,” but it is “subjectively satisfying” to the patients themselves. This was not a damning conclusion.
Yet, within two months, Johns Hopkins had shuttered its clinic. The New York Times reported that universities would feel pressure to similarly “curtail their operations and discourage others from starting to do them.” Indeed, only a handful of clinics remained by the 1990s. Transgender medicine did not return to Johns Hopkins until 2017.
In requiring trans patients to enter straight marriages and hold gender-appropriate jobs to be considered successful, Meyer and Reter’s study was homophobic and classist in design. The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry.
The 2020s − distrust in science
As in the 1930s, opposition to trans medicine today is part of a broad reactionary movement against what some far-right groups consider the “toxic normalization” of LGBTQ people.
But widespread distrust in science and medicine in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has affected how Americans perceive trans health care. Prohibitions on gender-affirming care have occurred simultaneously with the relaxing of pandemic restrictions, and some scholars argue that the movement against trans health care is part of a broader movement aimed at discrediting scientific consensus.
Yet the adage “believe in science” is not an effective rejoinder to these anti-trans policies. Instead, many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care. Medical gatekeeping occurs through stringent guidelines that govern access to trans health care, including mandated psychiatric evaluations and extended waiting periods that limit and control patient choice.
It is not clear how the current third wave of backlash to transgender medicine will end. For now, trans health care remains a question dominated by medical experts on one hand and people who question science on the other.
Even as Catholic dogma continues to repudiate same-sex marriage and gender transition, one of the most prominent religious orders in the United States — the Jesuits — is strengthening a unique outreach program for LGBTQ Catholics.
The initiative — fittingly called Outreach — was founded two years ago by the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit who is one of the country’s most prominent advocates for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the Catholic Church.
Outreach, a ministry of the Jesuit magazine America, sponsored conferences in New York City in 2022 and 2023, and last year launched a multifaceted website with news, essays and information about Catholic LGBTQ resources and events.
On Tuesday, there was another milestone for Outreach — the appointment of journalist and author Michael O’Loughlin as its first executive director.
O’Loughlin, a former staff writer at online newspaper Crux, has been the national correspondent at America. He is the author of a book recounting the varied ways that Catholics in the U.S. responded to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s — “Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear.”
O’Loughlin told The Associated Press he’s excited by his new job, viewing it as a chance to expand the range of Outreach’s programs and the national scope of its community.
“It’s an opportunity to highlight the ways LGBT people can be Catholic and active in parishes, ministries and charities,” he said. “There’s a lot of fear about to being too public about it. … I want them to realize they’re not alone.”
O’Loughlin says his current outlook evolved as he traveled to scores of places around the U.S. to promote his book, talking to groups of LGBTQ+ Catholics, and their families and friends, about how to make the church more welcoming to them.
Those conversations made O’Loughlin increasingly comfortable publicly identifying as a gay Catholic after years of wondering whether he should remain in the church. Its doctrine still condemns any sexual relations between gay or lesbian partners as “intrinsically disordered.”
The latest expansion of Outreach occurs amid a time of division within the global Catholic Church as it grapples with LGBTQ issues.
Pope Francis, a Jesuit who has met with Martin and sent letters of support to Outreach, has made clear he favors a more welcoming approach to LGBTQ people. At his direction, the Vatican recently gave priests greater leeway to bless same-sex couples and asserted that transgender people, in some circumstances, can be baptized.
However, there has been some resistance to the pope’s approach. Many conservative bishops in Africa, Europe and elsewhere said they would not implement the new policy regarding blessings. In the U.S., some bishops have issued directives effectively ordering diocesan personnel not to recognize transgender people’s gender identity.
Amid those conflicting developments, Martin and other Jesuit leaders are proud of Outreach’s accomplishments and optimistic about its future.
“There seems to be deep hunger for the kind of ministry that we’re doing, not only among LGBTQ Catholics, but also their families and friends,” Martin said by email from Ireland, where he was meeting last week with the the country’s Catholic bishops.
“Pope Francis has been very encouraging, allowing himself to be interviewed by Outreach and sending personal greetings to our conference last year,” Martin added. “Perhaps the most surprising support has been from several bishops who have written for our website, as well as some top-notch Catholic theologians who see the need for serious theological reflection on LGBTQ topics.”
Martin will remain engaged in Outreach’s oversight, holding the title of founder.
The Rev. Brian Paulson, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, evoked both Jesus and the pope when asked why his order had embraced the mission of Outreach.
“Pope Francis has repeatedly called leaders in the Catholic church to emulate the way Jesus spent his ministry on the peripheries, accompanying those who had experienced exclusion,” Paulson said email. “I think the work of Outreach is a response to this invitation.”
Paulson also said he was impressed by Martin’s “grace and patience” in responding to the often harsh criticism directed at him by some conservative Catholics.
There was ample evidence of Outreach’s stature at its conference last June at a branch of Fordham University in New York City. The event was preceded by a handwritten letter of support sent to Martin by Pope Francis, extending “prayers and good wishes” to the participants.
“It’s a special grace for LGBTQ Catholics to know that the pope is praying for them,” Martin said.
Another welcoming letter came from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York.
“It is the sacred duty of the Church and Her ministers to reach out to those on the periphery,” he wrote to the conference attendees.
The keynote speakers included Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, and the closing Mass was celebrated by Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration on Wednesday backed off its plans to impose rules that advocates feared would have restricted gender-affirming medical treatment for adults in a way no other state has.
The rules proposed by two state departments would have required the psychiatrists, endocrinologists and medial ethicists to have roles in creating gender-affirming care plans for clinics and hospitals. And patients under 21 would have been required to receive at least six months of counseling before starting hormone treatment or receiving gender-affirming surgery.
The Department of Health and Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services both issued revised proposals Wednesday after gathering public comment. Both said in memos that they were swayed by what they had learned as transgender people and care providers weighed in. The Health Department said it received 3,900 comments. In the new versions, the rules would apply only to the care of minors, not adults.
Over the last few years, 21 states have adopted laws banning at least some aspects of gender-affirming care for minors. Some are so new they haven’t taken effect yet, and a ban in Arkansas was struck down in court. But so far, only Florida has restricted care for adults.
The departments said the rules will now advance to the next step of review before being implemented.
The draft rules would still require that patients under 18 receive at least six months of mental health counseling before they can receive gender-affirming medications or surgeries. The revisions made Wednesday also expand the list of mental health professionals qualified to provide the required counseling, adding clinical nurses, social workers, school psychologists and some physicians.
Further, a medical ethicist would no longer be required to have a role in developing facility-wide treatment plans for the care. In a memo, the Health Department said that change was made partly because institutions already use medical ethics professionals to develop policies.
Some parts of the rules regarding care for minors could have a muted effect. Last month, the Legislature banned gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapies for minors by overriding DeWine’s December veto of that measure, which would allow children already receiving treatment to continue.
South Dakota has apologized and will pay $300,000 under a settlement with a transgender advocacy group that sued Gov. Kristi Noem and her health secretary last year after the state terminated a contract with it.
Attorneys for the Transformation Project announced the settlement Monday. The nonprofit sued last year after the state canceled the contract for a community health worker in December 2022. The contract included a roughly $136,000 state-administered federal grant, about $39,000 of which the group received, according to its attorneys.
The organization alleged the state’s decision “was based purely on national politics,” citing Noem’s statement to conservative media outlet The Daily Signal that the state government shouldn’t participate in the group’s efforts. The outlet had asked Noem about the group and one of its events.
“This settlement marks a significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to civil rights advocacy,” lead attorney Brendan Johnson said. “We commend the resiliency of the LGBTQ community and remain committed to vigorously upholding their rights.”
The apology, in a letter dated Jan. 18 and signed by South Dakota Secretary of Health Melissa Magstadt, reads: “On behalf of the State of South Dakota, I apologize that the Transformation Project’s contract was terminated and for treating the Transformation Project differently than other organizations awarded Community Health Worker contracts.
“I want to emphasize that all South Dakotans are entitled to equal treatment under the law — regardless of their race, color, national origin, religion, disability, age, or sex. South Dakota is committed to ensuring that no person is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subject to discrimination under any program, activity, or service that it provides,” she wrote.
Transformation Project Executive Director Susan Williams said she is glad the lawsuit is over and “it feels good to know that we won.”
“I would say that we settled with the apology. It would have been nice to have the apology come from our governor,” she said.
Magstadt was not health secretary at the time the contract was terminated. Her predecessor announced her retirement days after the state terminated the contract. The Transformation Project had hired a community health worker before the state ended the contract.
The state alleged contract violations in a letter from the deputy secretary noticing the termination. The group said it had complied.
Spokespersons for Noem and the state Department of Health did not immediately respond to email requests for comment on the settlement.
Transformation Project Community Health Worker/Project Coordinator Jack Fonder said in a statement: “I assumed the role of CHW with the intention of providing trans people in our community with the resources they require to succeed in this state, little realizing that doing so would result in my own outing as a trans man for standing up for what is right. We promise to keep up the battle for transgender rights and to make sure they have access to the resources they require.”
Fundraising helped continue Fonder’s position, Williams said. Fonder helps transgender people find shelter, housing and employment, as well as support with legal paperwork and driving people to appointments, among other needs.
Williams said the organization would apply for future grants from the state, and she hopes similar groups “will feel more confident” to apply, too.
The nonprofit offers help for LGBTQ people and their families, such as suicide prevention and guiding people through health care and social services, and educates about gender identity.
South Dakota and other Republican-led states have passed laws in recent years that have raised complaints about discrimination against transgender people, such as restricting school sports participation and banning gender-affirming care for kids.
Alongside bans on gender-affirming care for minors and bans on teaching LGBTQ+ topics in public schools, the state enacted a law that also requires school districts to “at a minimum” prohibit trans students from using restrooms that align with their gender identity, and mandates that schools staff out LGBTQ+ students to their guardians.
But something else significant happened in Kentucky in 2023: The state swore in its first-ever transgender elected official. Even more significant, she was sworn in to her local school board.
Rebecca Blankenship has been a member of the Berea Independent School District’s board of education for one year now and is still the only out transgender person who’s ever been elected to any office in Kentucky. Moreover, during her time in the position, the state legislature has “forced us to implement policies that turn our stomachs,” she says.
While this may seem like a cause for despair, Blankenship isn’t losing focus. Despite the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being pumped out by state lawmakers, there are pro-LGBTQ+ measures she believes are capable of passing in the state. More importantly, there is no law the Kentucky Legislature can pass that bans basic kindness.
“Our Berea board would have loved to stand up for LGBT kids. Our state legislature, though, which is completely power mad, completely out of control, wants to come into small communities and dictate how we are going to treat each other,” Blankenship tells The Advocate. “They have forced us to implement policies that turn our stomachs, but what they cannot do is force teachers, and school staff, and bus drivers, and everybody who does their job because of the kids, to start treating those kids with cruelty or disrespect.”
“The legislature cannot ban their kindness,” she adds.
While a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ laws has gone through in the state – the majority of which target transgender minors – there’s one policy Blankenship is pushing for that could protect trans kids, and its approval is showing “early promise.” The initiative? Ban conversion therapy within the state of Kentucky. The strategy? Highlight anti-transgender hypocrisy.
Three local governments in the state have passed ordinances banning the draconian practice, but none have enforced them, Blankenship claims. This has helped “increase the pressure on the state legislature [to say] that they need to take action, so that they can’t just leave this to somebody else.”
“Another thing that has helped us increase interest in doing this bill is that the legislature banned gender-affirming care for minors last year,” Blankenship notes. “They spent the whole year talking about how they wanted to ban unethical experimental medical treatments for LGBT youth. Well, here’s one. … I think that we’re really turning some heads with the idea that we need to be consistent.”
The Kentucky Legislature’s attacks on LGBTQ+ people have significant consequences, but they have also fostered a greater sense of community among queer people in the state. Blankenship says that lately more and more people have been inspired to get involved in local politics and even to run for office – particularly transgender people. In fact, the state may soon have its second transgender elected official and first trans representative if Emma Curtis wins her bid for the 93rd House District in Lexington.
Those are two of the biggest steps Blankenship believes people can take to support the trans community in a time where they’re under attack: run for office, and donate to those running for office who are LGBTQ+, or at least supportive of queer people. The third step is to “push their local party establishments and democratic powerhouses to do the same things: to endorse these candidates, to put money behind these candidates, to put effort behind these candidates.”
“The City Council and the school board are more important than the president,” Blankenship says. “Our local governments affect our lives so, so profoundly, and LGBT people have the same basic needs as everybody else. We pay rent, we drive on roads, we send our kids to school. … If we can all uplift each other, we can achieve a new kind of power. We can achieve a new kind of community and a new kind of politics that works for everybody.”
Enfranchising such candidates won’t just change policy nationally, she explains, but it will also “change hearts and minds locally,” as it “demonstrates that we have so much more in common with regular people, working people, than we have differences.”
“It’s not regular people who want to hurt us, it’s national organizations that try to co-opt religion to build power through hate,” Blankenship continues. “The fact that Kentucky’s first openly trans elected official didn’t come from a city, but from a little bitty mountain town, proves that the stereotype of queerphobic rural conservatives is just not the reality.”
She adds: “My election showed that this is something that can happen. … If a trans person can win here in Appalachian State hills, they can win anywhere.”
The CEOs of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord testified in the Senate on Wednesday to discuss the online exploitation of children. The discussion brought up the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bipartisan bill that seeks to protect minors from online harm. But KOSA has come under fire from some LGBTQ+ activists and groups who fear that the bill will enable Republicans to block queer youth from seeing age-appropriate LGBTQ+ content online.
Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, says revisions to the bill have helped ensure that its current version will protect all kids and safeguard against potential misuse by anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. But Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit that protects people’s human rights in the digital age, says KOSA unconstitutionally violates free speech rights and will result in social media companies broadly censoring LGBTQ+ content rather than risking lawsuits from attorneys general.
It’s undeniable that social media can negatively impact mental health. Last year, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory noting how the frequency and kinds of information shown to young people on social media can cause a “profound risk of harm” to their mental health.
“Children and adolescents on social media are commonly exposed to extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content, and those who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of poor mental health including experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety,” the Surgeon General’s report on Social Media and Youth Mental Health said. Social media’s content and design can also make some young people feel addicted to it, increasing body dysmorphia, low self-esteem, and even self-harming behaviors, the report added.
KOSA tries to remedy this by requiring online platforms to take measures to prevent recommending content that promotes mental health disorders (like eating disorders, drug use, self-harm, sexual abuse, and bullying) unless minors specifically search for such content. KOSA also requires platforms to limit features that result in compulsive usage — like autoplay and infinite scroll — or allow adults to contact or track young users’ location. The bill says platforms must provide parents with easy-to-use tools to safeguard their child’s social media settings and notify parents if their kids are exposed to potentially hazardous materials or interactions.
Furthermore, KOSA requires platforms to submit annual reports to the federal government containing details about their non-adult users, the internal steps they’ve taken to protect minors from online harms, the “concern reports” – or reports platforms issue parents when their child encounters any harmful content – they’ve issued to parents, and descriptions of interventions they’ve taken to mitigate harms to minors. These reports will be overseen by an independent third-party auditor who consults with parents, researchers, and youth experts on additional methods and best practices for safeguarding minors’ well-being online.
KOSA has bipartisan support, including that of President Joe Biden as well as 46 senatorial co-sponsors, 21 of whom are Democrats, including lesbian Sen. Tammy Baldwin (WI) and LGBTQ+ allies like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA). LGBTQ Nation reached out to Baldwin and Warren’s offices for additional comment but didn’t receive a response by the time of publication. KOSA is also supported by groups like Common Sense Media, Fairplay, Design It For Us, Accountable Tech, Eating Disorders Coalition, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
But while parents of transgender youth and numerous pro-LGBTQ+ organizations agree that social media can negatively impact young people’s mental health, many other groups have nonetheless opposed the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the LGBT Technology Partnership, as well as LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations in six states.
“KOSA is, at its heart, a censorship bill,” Mandy Salley, Chief Operating Officer of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, a group that advocates for sexual freedom as a fundamental human right, told LGBTQ Nation. “If passed in its current form, we believe that KOSA will hinder the ability of everyone to access information online and negatively harm many communities that are already censored online, including sex therapists, sex workers, sex educators, and the broader LGBTQ+ community. Our human right to free expression cannot be ignored in favor of supposed ‘safety’ on the Internet.”
The big sticking point: KOSA’s Duty of Care provision
Specifically, Woodhull and the other aforementioned organizations are worried about the bill’s Duty of Care provision that allows attorneys general to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, require documentation from, and file civil lawsuits against any platforms that have “threatened or adversely affected” minors’ well-being. LGBTQ+ advocates fear that Republican attorneys general who consider LGBTQ+ identities as harmful forms of mental illness will use KOSA to censor such web content and prosecute platforms that provide access to such content.
In a July 2023 Teen Vogue op-ed, digital rights organizer Sarah Philips wrote that the bill “authorizes state attorneys general to be the ultimate arbiters of what is good or bad for kids. If a state attorney general asserts that information about gender-affirming care or abortion care could cause a child depression or anxiety, they could sue an app or website for not removing that content.”
It didn’t help that KOSA was introduced by anti-LGBTQ+ Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who has said that one of the bill’s top priorities is to protect children from “the transgender in this culture.”
“[Social media] is where children are being indoctrinated,” Blackburn told the Family Policy Alliance, a conservative Christian organization, in a September 2023 speech. “They’re hearing things at school and then they’re getting onto YouTube to watch a video and all of a sudden this comes to them… They click on something and, the next thing you know, they’re being inundated with it.”
Blackburn’s office told LGBTQ Nation that her comment had been “taken out of context” and wasn’t related to KOSA, stating, “KOSA will not — nor was it designed to — target or censor any individual or community.” But the anti-LGBTQ+ conservative think tank Heritage Foundation has also said it wishes to use the law to “guard” kids against the “harms of… transgender content.”
But Marquez-Garrett told LGBTQ Nation that these concerns are based on an old version of the bill that has since been revised after consultation with concerned LGBTQ+ activists.
“If [the possibility of an attorney general misusing a law is] the standard by which we judge all laws, we’re never going to have new laws because the reality is an unscrupulous attorney general can try,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean they’re going to succeed.”
First, she points out that Philips’s concern about attorney generals suing platforms for not removing pro-LGBTQ+ content doesn’t necessarily apply for two reasons: KOSA doesn’t regulate what LGBTQ+ or allegedly harmful content a site can host — it regulates what content that websites automatically suggest to young users. Users of all ages can still access any material that they deliberately search for.
Moreover, attorneys general have to prove to a judge and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that, by KOSA’s definitions, LGBTQ+ content harms young users’ mental health. Such arguments won’t pass muster with every judge or FTC commissioner.
Marquez-Garret noted that after Sen. Blackburn made her concerning comments, the bill was revised with input from queer advocates and reintroduced with amendments meant to account for those concerns. For example, while the original bill broadly required web platforms to prevent all “harms” to minors, the revised bill specifically mentions the harms companies must work against (including suicidal behaviors, eating disorders, substance use, sexual exploitation, and ads for tobacco and alcohol).
She also notes that KOSA says an attorney general who begins civil actions under KOSA will be required to issue a report of any action to the FTC. The FTC will then have the right to intervene.
“The FTC is only as good as the people running it,” Marquez-Garrett told LGBTQ Nation. “And we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.” But, assuming that the FTC is “not nefarious and is reasonable,” she continued, if the FTC begins an investigation into the actions, the attorney general’s home state is forbidden from taking any additional actions.
Marquez-Garrett also points out that the revised version of KOSA contains a carveout that says that if a minor searches for any sort of content, including LGBTQ+ content, then they’re allowed to see it even if an attorney general considers it harmful. Additionally, KOSA also explicitly excludes many websites from its control, including government platforms, libraries, and non-profits. That means if a minor finds pro-LGBTQ+ content on the websites of the ACLU, The Trevor Project, or the Human Rights Campaign, an attorney general can’t prosecute.
Furthermore, under the revised KOSA, websites aren’t required to install age verification or parental consent functionality that might prevent young people from accessing different platforms. Though Greer questioned how social media platforms can comply with the bill without conducting age verification, Marquez-Garrett says Greer’s question ignores KOSA’s plain language and echoes “another Big Tech narrative about Big Tech’s ability or inability to comply with KOSA.”
Regardless, under KOSA, platforms are also expressly forbidden from being required to disclose a minor’s browsing behavior, search history, messages, contact list, or other content or metadata of their communications that could potentially out them to their parents.
“We totally agree that big tech platforms and the surveillance capitalist business model that they employ are doing real harm, and that they’re specifically harming LGBTQ people and communities,” Greer, director of Fight for the Future (FFF), told LGBTQ Nation. “But as long as KOSA attempts to dictate what content platforms can recommend, it will be unconstitutional.”
FFF and the ACLU have said that the government cannot force platforms to suppress entire categories of content or to suppress all content that might lead to a minor becoming depressed or anxious without violating the First Amendment.
Greer said that legislators behind KOSA should have consulted more with civil liberties and human rights advocates, like her organization and the ACLU, to consider a bill’s potential constitutional and human rights pitfalls.
Marquez-Garrett disagrees with Greer’s characterization, telling LGBTQ Nation, “KOSA does not prohibit content of any sort, nor does it prohibit posting of any content by third parties, so does not run afoul of the First Amendment.”
Apart from the constitutionality issue, Greer most worries that if social companies are subjected to liability for content, they will over-remove content to avoid getting sued. “This is exactly what happened with SESTA,” she said, referencing two bipartisan laws passed in 2018 that sought to reduce sex trafficking online.
Because the law held online companies liable for any user content that could be seen as facilitating sex work, many online businesses just opted to shut down any forums for sex or dating. Others banned any potential “adult content” (including discussion boards), deleted content about avoiding sexually transmitted infections, and created rules forbidding sexual comments. The law made sex workers much more vulnerable to traffickers and made actual sex trafficking much more difficult to track, its critics say. Even Sen. Warren, who supported the law, expressed regret for its unintended consequences.
“Do I think that Mark Zuckerberg is going to go to bat in court to protect my kid’s ability to continue engaging in the online communities that she finds supportive and loving and caring? Absolutely not,” Greer said. “He’s gonna roll over and do whatever he thinks he needs to do to avoid his company getting sued,” she added, especially if they’re threatened by “rogue” attorneys general, conservative judges, or an FTC run by the administration of Donald Trump.
“Do people really want to gamble with trans kids’ lives hoping that we’ll never have a bigot in the White House ever again? I sure don’t,” Greer added.
In an informational white paper, FFF said that if a user searches for “Why do I feel different from other boys,” and a platform returns search results about gender identity, an attorney general can argue that that’s not what the user was searching for, and thus the platform is liable for “algorithmically recommending” that content.
Is there a way to fix KOSA’s potential problems?
If KOSA becomes law, social media companies won’t risk attracting these attorneys’ attention, Greer and other groups worry. Instead, the companies will react by omitting, algorithmically suppressing, or blocking large swaths of LGBTQ+ content — not just “recommended” served by platform algorithms.
This would affect not only content related to LGBTQ+ issues and other controversial but important topics for users they believe could be minors (including content from The Trevor Project or the Human Rights Campaign, Greer says), but also any users’ or resources’ posts sharing information about queer health resources, life experiences, and social events, Greer predicted, since all social media content is regulated by algorithms.
“I truly believe that legislation [like KOSA] that enables this type of government censorship makes kids less safe, and not more safe,” Greer says. “It feels to me like it’s driven by the same bad thinking behind abstinence-only sex education: the idea that we protect kids by cutting them off from information rather than by allowing them to access it.”
Marquez-Garrett disagrees. “KOSA is plain on its face, and efforts to misinterpret KOSA will not succeed. If a conservative attorney general could simply attack a type of content it doesn’t like, then liberal attorneys general could do the same, such as with guns, or political content, or any number of potentially objectionable topics. And KOSA’s own limitations would provide complying platforms with viable defenses.”
But instead of supporting KOSA in its current form, FFF has encouraged legislators to ditch its Duty of Care provision and replace it with a strict privacy regime that bans any use of minors’ personal data to power algorithmic recommendation systems. The FFF also suggested explicitly prohibiting specific manipulative business practices, like autoplay, infinite scroll, intrusive notifications, and surveillance advertising.
Lawmakers should also drop the provision in KOSA allowing enforcement by attorneys general, the FFF suggests. Instead, its provisions could be enforced by the FTC as “unfair or deceptive business practices,” which the FTC already has a mandate to crack down on. This would aid the law’s constitutionality and bring the law into the realm of regulating these businesses the same way that the federal government already regulates many other businesses.
Some social media platforms and influencers are opposed to any government oversight, Marquez-Garrett says, because policies that limit what their algorithms can recommend also reduce their overall content engagement and, thus, their profits.
Currently, social media platforms aren’t protecting LGBTQ+ kids, she adds. A minor who searches for “gay pride” may be served videos telling them that being gay is bad and that gay people are going to hell and should kill themselves. Platforms also regularly remove LGBTQ+ content for allegedly violating platform policies or potentially offending users in other countries.
She believes that KOSA could help open the playing field for platforms that don’t harmfully target kids because any such actions will become a matter of public record and scrutiny. This will allow ethical web designers to create better systems that protect children’s needs. That’s especially important, she said, since numerous studies have shown that access to positive online LGBTQ+ media and communities can improve young queers’ mental health.
Ultimately, she believes that everyone should support protecting children, especially as more studies show how negative online experiences can increase mental distress and suicidality among kids.
“We cannot give big tech a free pass and assume they have our kids’ best interests at heart,” she said.
We are calling on Facebook and Instagram to do more to make their social media platforms safe for LGBT users who face digital targeting and severe offline consequences including detention and torture.ACT NOW
In February 2023, Human Rights Watch published a report on the digital targeting of LGBT people in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, and its offline consequences. The report details how government officials across the MENA region are targeting LGBT people based on their online activity on social media, including on Meta platforms. Security forces have entrapped LGBT people on social media and dating applications, subjected them to online extortion, online harassment, doxxing, and outing; and relied on illegitimately obtained digital photos, chats, and similar information in prosecutions. In cases of online harassment, which took place predominantly in public posts on Facebook and Instagram, affected individuals faced offline consequences, which often contributed to ruining their lives.
As a follow up to the report and based on its recommendations, including to Meta, the “Secure Our Socials” campaign identifies ongoing issues of concern, and aims to engage Meta platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, to publish meaningful data on investment in user safety, including regarding content moderation in the MENA region, and around the world.
On January 8, 2024, Human Rights Watch sent an official letter to Meta to inform relevant staff of the campaign and its objectives, and to solicit Meta’s perspective. Meta responded to the letter on January 24.
Social media platforms can provide a vital medium for communication and empowerment. At the same time, LGBT people around the world face disproportionately high levels of online abuse. Particularly in the MENA region, LGBT people and groups advocating for LGBT rights have relied on digital platforms for empowerment, access to information, movement building, and networking. In contexts in which governments prohibit LGBT groups from operating, organizing by activists to expose anti-LGBT violence and discrimination has mainly happened online. While digital platforms have offered an efficient and accessible way to appeal to public opinion and expose rights violations, enabling LGBT people to express themselves and amplify their voices, they have also become tools for state-sponsored repression.
Building on research by Article 19, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Association for Progressive Communication (APC), and others, Human Rights Watch has documented how state actors and private individuals have been targeting LGBT people in the MENA region based on their online activity, in blatant violation of their right to privacy and other human rights. Across the region, authorities manually monitor social media, create fake profiles to impersonate LGBT people, unlawfully search LGBT people’s personal devices, and rely on illegitimately obtained digital photos, chats, and similar information taken from LGBT people’s mobile devices and social media accounts as “evidence” to arrest and prosecute them.
LGBT people and activists in the MENA region have experienced online entrapment, extortion, doxxing, outing, and online harassment, including threats of murder, rape, and other physical violence. Law enforcement officials play a central role in these abuses, at times initiating online harassment campaigns by posting photos and contact information of LGBT people on social media and inciting violence against them.
Digital targeting of LGBT people in the MENA region has had far-reaching offline consequences that did not end in the instance of online abuse, but reverberated throughout affected individuals’ lives, in some cases for years. The immediate offline consequences of digital targeting range from arbitrary arrest to torture and other ill-treatment in detention, including sexual assault.
Digital targeting has also had a significant chilling effect on LGBT expression. After they were targeted, LGBT people began practicing self-censorship online, including in their choice of digital platforms and how they use those platforms. Those who cannot or do not wish to hide their identities, or whose identities are revealed without their consent, reported suffering immediate consequences ranging from online harassment to arbitrary arrest and prosecution.
As a result of online harassment, LGBT people in the MENA region have reported losing their jobs, being subjected to family violence including conversion practices, being extorted based on online interactions, being forced to change their residence and phone numbers, delete their social media accounts, or flee their country of residence, and suffering severe mental health consequences.
Meta is the largest social media company in the world. It has a responsibility to safeguard its users against the misuse of its platforms. Facebook and Instagram, in particular, are significant vehicles for state actors’ and private individuals’ targeting of LGBT people in the MENA region. More consistent enforcement and improvement of its policies and practices can make digital targeting more difficult and, by extension, make all users, including LGBT people in the MENA region, safer.
As an initial step toward transparency, the “Secure Our Socials” campaign asks Meta to disclose its annual investment in user safety and security including reasoned justifications explaining how trust and safety investments are proportionate to the risk of harm, for each MENA region language and dialect. We specifically inquire about the number, diversity, regional expertise, political independence, training qualifications, and relevant language (including dialect) proficiency of staff or contractors tasked with moderating content originating from the MENA region, and request that this information be made public.
Meta frequently relies on contractors and subcontractors to moderate content, and it is equally important for Meta to be transparent about these arrangements.
Outsourcing content moderation should not come at the expense of working conditions. Meta should publish data on its investment in safe and fair working conditions for content moderators (regardless of whether they are staff, contractors, or sub-contractors), including psychosocial support; as well as data on content moderators’ adherence to nondiscrimination policies, including around sexual orientation and gender identity. Publicly ensuring adequate resourcing of content moderators is an important step toward improving Meta’s ability to accurately identify content targeting LGBT people on its platforms.
We also urge Meta to detail what automated tools are being used in its content moderation for each non-English language and dialect (prioritizing Arabic), including what training data and models are used and how each model is reviewed and updated over time. Meta should also publish information regarding precisely when and how automated tools are used to assess content, including details regarding the frequency and impact of human oversight. In addition, we urge Meta to conduct and publish an independent audit of any language models and automated content analysis tools being applied to each dialect of the Arabic language, and other languages in the MENA region for their relative accuracy and adequacy in addressing the human rights impacts on LGBT people where they are at heightened risk. To do so, Meta should engage in deep and regular consultation with independent human rights groups to identify gaps in its practices that leave LGBT people at risk.
Meta’s over-reliance on automation when assessing content and complaints also undermines its ability to moderate content in a manner that is transparent and lacking bias. Meta should develop a rapid response mechanism to ensure LGBT-specific complaints [in high-risk regions] are reviewed by a human with regional, subject matter, and linguistic expertise, in a timely manner. Meta’s safety practices can do more to make its platforms less prone to abuse of LGBT people in the MENA region. Public disclosures have shown that Meta has frequently failed to invest enough resources into its safety practices, sometimes rejecting internal calls for greater investment in regional content moderation even at times of clear and unequivocal risk to its users.
In the medium term, Human Rights Watch and its partners call on Meta to audit the adequacy of existing safety measures and continue to engage with civil society groups to carry out gap analyses on existing content moderation and safety practices. Finally, regarding safety features and based on uniform requests by affected individuals, we recommend that Meta implement a one-step account lockdown tool of user accounts, allow users to hide their contact lists, and introduce a mechanism to remotely wipe all Meta content and accounts (including from WhatsApp and Threads) on a given device.
Some of the threats faced by LGBT people in the MENA region require thoughtful and creative solutions, particularly where law enforcement agents are actively using Meta’s platforms as a targeting tool. Meta should dedicate resources towards research and engagement with LGBT and digital rights groups in the MENA region, for example, by implementing the “Design from the Margins” (DFM) framework developed by Afsaneh Rigot, a digital rights researcher and advocate. Only with a sustained commitment to actively centering the experiences of those most impacted in all its design processes, can Meta truly reduce the risks and harms faced by LGBT people on its platforms.
Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, social media companies, including Meta, have a responsibility to respect human rights – including the rights to nondiscrimination, privacy, and freedom of expression – on their platforms. They are required to avoidinfringing on human rights, and to identify and address human rights impacts arising from their services including by providing meaningful access to remedies and to communicate how they are addressing these impacts.
When moderating content on its platforms, Meta’s responsibilities include taking steps to ensure its policies and practices are transparent, accountable, and applied in a consistent and nondiscriminatory manner. Meta is also responsible for mitigating the human rights violations perpetrated against LGBT people on its platforms while respecting the right to freedom of expression.
The Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation provide useful guidance for companies to achieve their responsibilities. These include the need for integrating human rights and due process considerations at all levels of content moderation, comprehensible and precise rules regarding content-related decisions, and the need for cultural competence. The Santa Clara Principles also specifically require transparency regarding the use of automated tools in decisions that impact the availability of content and call for human oversight of automated decisions.
Human rights also protect against unauthorized access to personal data, and platforms should therefore also take steps to secure people’s accounts and data against unauthorized access and compromise.
The Secure Our Socials campaign recommendations are aimed at improving Meta’s ability to meet its human rights responsibilities. In developing and applying content moderation policies, Meta should also reflect and take into account the specific ways people experience discrimination and marginalization, including the experiences of LGBT people in the MENA region. These experiences should drive product design, including through the prioritization of safety features.
Regarding human rights due diligence, Human Rights Watch and its partners also recommend that Meta conduct periodic human rights impact assessments in particular countries or regional contexts, dedicating adequate time and resources into engaging rights holders.
Many forms of online harassment faced by LGBT people on Facebook and Instagram are prohibited by Meta’s Community Standards, which place limits on bullying and harassment, and indicate that the platform will “remove content that is meant to degrade or shame” private individuals including “claims about someone’s sexual activity,” and protect private individuals against claims about their sexual orientation and gender identity, including outing of LGBT people. Meta’s community standards also prohibit some forms of doxxing, such as posting people’s private phone numbers and home addresses, particularly when weaponized for malicious purposes.
Due to shortcomings in its content moderation practices, including over-enforcement in certain contexts and under-enforcement in others, Meta often struggles to apply these prohibitions in a manner that is transparent, accountable, and consistent. As a result, harmful content sometimes remains on Meta platforms even when it contributes to detrimental offline consequences for LGBT people and violates Meta’s policies. On the other hand, Meta disproportionately censors, removes, or restricts non-violative content, silencing political dissent or voices documenting and raising awareness about human rights abuses on Facebook and Instagram. For example, Human Rights Watch published a report in December 2023 documenting Meta’s censorship of pro-Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook.
Meta’s approach to content moderation on its platforms involves a combination of proactive and complaint-driven measures. Automation plays a central role in both sets of measures and is often relied upon heavily to justify under-investment in content moderators. The result is that content moderation outcomes frequently fail to align with Meta’s policies, often leaving the same groups of people both harassed and censored.
Procedurally, individuals and organizations can report content on Facebook and Instagram that they believe violates Community Standards or Guidelines, and request that the content be removed or restricted. Following Meta’s decision, the complainant, or the person whose content was removed, can usually request that Meta review the decision. If Meta upholds its decision for a second time, the user can sometimes appeal the platform’s decision to Meta’s Oversight Board, but the Board only accepts a limited amount of cases.
Meta relies on automation to detect and remove content deemed violative by the relevant platform and recurring violative content, regardless of complaints, as well as in processing existing complaints and appeals where applicable.
Meta does not publish data on automation error rates or statistics on the degree to which automation plays a role in processing complaints and appeals. Meta’s lack of transparency hinders independent human rights and other researchers’ ability to hold its platforms accountable, allowing wrongful content takedowns as well as inefficient moderation processes for violative content, especially in non-English languages, to remain unchecked.
In its 2023 digital targeting report, Human Rights Watch interviewed LGBT people in the MENA region who reported complaining about online harassment and abusive content to Facebook and Instagram. In all these cases, platforms did not remove the content, claiming it did not violate Community Standards or Guidelines. Such content, reviewed by Human Rights Watch, included outing, doxxing, and death threats, which resulted in severe offline consequences for LGBT people. Not only did automation fail to detect this content, but even when it was reported, the automation was ineffective in removing harmful content. As a result, it barred LGBT people who complained and their requests were denied from access to an effective remedy, the timeliness of which could have limited offline harm.
Human Rights Watch has also documented, in another 2023 report, the disproportionate removal of non-violative content in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook, often restricted through automation processes before it appears on the platform, a process that has contributed to the censorship of peaceful expression at a critical time.
Meta also moderates content in compliance with government requests it receives for content removal on Facebook and Instagram. While some government requests flag content contrary to national laws, other requests for content removal lack a legal basis and rely instead on alleged violations of Meta’s policies. Informal government requests can exert significant pressure on companies, and can result in silencing political dissent.
Meta’s insufficient investment in human content moderators and its over-reliance on automation undermine its ability to address content on its platform. Content targeting LGBT people is not always removed in an expeditious manner even where it violates Meta’s policies, whereas content intended by LGBT people to be empowering can be improperly censored, compounding the serious restrictions LGBT people in the MENA region already face.
As the “Secure Our Socials” campaign details, effective content moderation requires an understanding of regional, linguistic, and subject matter context.
Human content moderators at Meta can also misunderstand important context when moderating content. For example, Instagram removed a post of an array of Arabic terms labelled as “hate speech” targeting LGBT people by multiple moderators who failed to recognize the post was being used in a self-referential and empowering way to raise awareness. One major contributing factor to these errors was Meta’s inadequate training and a failure to translate its English-language training manuals into Arabic dialects.
In 2021, LGBT activists in the MENA region developed the Arabic Queer Hate Speech Lexicon, which identifies and contextualizes hate speech terms through a collaborative project between activists in seventeen countries in the MENA region. The lexicon includes hate speech terms in multiple Arabic dialects, is in both Arabic and English, and is a living document that activists aim to update periodically. To better detect anti-LGBT hate speech in Arabic, as well as remedy adverse human rights impacts, Meta could benefit from the lexicon as a guide for its internal list of hate speech terms and should actively engage LGBT and digital rights activists in the MENA region to ensure that terms are contextualized.
Meta relies heavily on automation to proactively identify content that violates its policies and to assess content complaints from users. Automated content assessment tools frequently fail to grasp critical contextual factors necessary to comprehend content, significantly undermining Meta’s ability to assess content. For example, Meta’s automated systems rejected, without any human involvement, ten out of twelve complaints and two out of three appeals against a recent post calling for death by suicide of transgender people, even though Meta’s Bullying and Harassment policy prohibits “calls for self-injury or suicide of a specific person or groups of individuals.”
Automated systems also face unique challenges when attempting to moderate non-English content and have been shown to struggle with moderating content in Arabic dialects. One underlying problem is that the same Arabic word or phrase can mean something entirely different depending on the region, context, or dialect being used. But language models used to automate content moderation will often rely on more common or formal variants to “learn” Arabic, greatly undermining their ability to understand content in Arabic dialects. Meta recently committed to examining dialect-specific automation tools, but it continues to rely heavily on automation while these tools are being developed and has not committed to any criteria to ensure the adequacy of these new tools prior to their adoption.
Meta’s policies prohibit the use of its Facebook and Instagram platforms for surveillance, including for law enforcement and national security purposes. This prohibition includes fake accounts created by law enforcement to investigate users, and applies to government officials in the MENA region that would entrap LGBT people. Accounts reported for entrapment could be deactivated or deleted, and Meta has initiated legal action against systemic misuses of its platform, including for police surveillance purposes.
However, Meta’s prohibition against the use of fake accounts has not been applied in a manner that pays adequate attention to the human rights impacts of people who face heightened marginalization in society. In fact, the fake account prohibition has been used against LGBT people. False reporting of accounts on Facebook for using fake names has been used in online harassment campaigns; unlike Facebook, Instagram does not prohibit the use of pseudonyms. Facebook’s aggressive enforcement of its real name policy has also historically led to the removal of LGBT Facebook accounts using pseudonyms to shield themselves from discrimination, harassment, or worse. Investigations into the authenticity of pseudonymous accounts can also disproportionately undermine the privacy of LGBT people.
The problems that Human Rights Watch and its partners hope to address in this campaign do not only occur on Meta’s platforms. Law enforcement agents and private individuals use fake accounts to entrap LGBT people on dating apps such as Grindr and WhosHere.
Before publishing its February report, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Grindr, to which Grindr responded extensively in writing, acknowledging our concerns and addressing gaps. While we also sent a letter to Meta in February, we did not receive a written response.
Online harassment, doxxing, and outing are also prevalent on other social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter). X’s approach to safety on its platform has come under criticism in recent years, as its safety and integrity teams faced significant staffing cuts on several occasions.
Meta continues to operate the largest social media company in the world, and its platforms have substantial reach. Additionally, Meta’s platforms cover a range of services, ranging from public posts to private messaging. Improving Meta’s practices would have significant impact and serve as a useful point of departure for a broader engagement with other platforms around digital targeting of LGBT people in the MENA region.
The targeting of LGBT people online is enabled by their legal precarity offline. Many countries, including in the MENA region, outlaw same-sex relations or criminalize forms of gender expression. The criminalization of same-sex conduct or, where same-sex conduct is not criminalized, the application of vague “morality” and “debauchery” provisions against LGBT people emboldens digital targeting, quells LGBT expression online and offline, and serves as the basis for prosecutions of LGBT people.
In recent years, many MENA region governments, including Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, have introduced cybercrime laws that target dissent and undermine the rights to freedom of expression and privacy. Governments have used cybercrime laws to target and arrest LGBT people, and to block access to same-sex dating apps. In the absence of legislation protecting LGBT people from discrimination online and offline, both security forces and private individuals have been able to target them online with impunity.
Governments in the MENA region are also failing to hold private actors to account for their digital targeting of LGBT people. LGBT people often do not report crimes against them to the authorities, either because of previous attempts in which the complaint was dismissed or no action was taken, or because they reasonably believed they would be blamed for the crime due to their non-conforming sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression. Human Rights Watch documented cases where LGBT people who reported being extorted to the authorities ended up getting arrested themselves.
Governments should respect and protect the rights of LGBT people instead of criminalizing their expression and targeting them online. The five governments covered in Human Rights Watch’s digital targeting report should introduce and implement legislation protecting against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, including online.
Security forces, in particular, should stop harassing and arresting LGBT people on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression and instead ensure protection from violence. They should also cease the improper and abusive gathering or fabrication of private digital information to support the prosecution of LGBT people. Finally, the governments should ensure that all perpetrators of digital targeting – and not the LGBT victims themselves – are held responsible for their crimes.
Spread the word about potential harms for LGBT users on social media platforms and the need for action.
The #SecureOurSocials campaign is calling on Meta platforms, Facebook, and Instagram, to be more accountable and transparent on content moderation and user safety by publishing meaningful data on its investment in user safety, including content moderation, and to adopt some additional safety features.
You can take action now. Email Facebook President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert to act on user safety.
Firefighters in Decatur, Georgia have determined that an October fire at a local gender-affirming care clinic was intentionally set in a move one activist has labeled “terrorism.”
The fire in the city’s historic Blair Building was “contained to one office and no injuries were reported,” according to a recent statement from the City of Decatur Fire Rescue Department.
The statement expressed that an investigation has determined the fire “to be incendiary in nature, indicating the fire was intentionally set.” No suspects have been identified.
The Blair building houses several medical providers, but a police report confirms that the target of the fire was QMed, which focuses on gender-affirming care, Decaturish reported.
“We won’t be intimidated,” QMed owner Dr. Izzy Lowell told Atlanta News First.“We will not stop providing life-saving care to our patients.” While the office is “completely destroyed,” Lowell said the clinic is seeing patients remotely. She also confirmed the FBI is investigating the arson attack as a hate crime.
Georgia passed a hate crime law in 2020. H.B. 426 became the first law in the state to specifically protect LGBTQ+ residents and give stronger punishments to those whose crimes target victims due to their LGBTQ+ identity, or due to other factors such as their race, religion, or national origin.
Trans activist Alejandra Caraballo wrote on X that the attack “is following the antiabortion playbook of destroying clinics to get them shut down.”
“This is terrorism,” she concluded.
The Movement Advancement Project gave Georgia 1 point out of a possible 44.5 for its LGBTQ+ policies, leaving it with an overall rating of “low.”
In March 2023, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed a ban on trans youth receiving gender-affirming health care. The law revokes the licenses of medical professionals who administer surgeries or hormone replacement therapy for transgender people under the age of 18. The law creates an exemption for cisgender youth; they are allowed gender-affirming care to conform to their sex assigned at birth.
Puberty blockers, however, are not banned under the legislation.
The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all rejected claims that gender-affirming care harms transgender children or adults. Additionally, gender-affirming surgery is almost never performed on youth.